Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco - Hardcover

David L. Phillips is Director of the Nobel Laureates Initiative at the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies, and Program Director of American University's Center for Global Peace. He lives in New York City.

In an ambitious attempt to render bureaucracy dramatic, Phillips, a defecting former senior policy adviser to President Bush, sets out to describe the policy meetings, memos and internal government negotiations behind the Iraq war, and to contrast what he sees as the reality of the occupation with the stated policies of the government. During the runup to the war, Phillips nurtured an authentically diverse coalition of Iraqis and international officials to plan Iraq's economic and political reconstruction. In a text whose main character is a working group (even if it is, as its Iraqi members call it, "the Mother of All Working Groups"), Phillips documents the increasing rhetorical volume of Wolfowitz, Bremer, and Bush himself, while matter-of-factly describing what he sees as the disastrous effect of their policies on the U.S.'s effort to win the trust of Iraqis before the war. The Bush administration, he charges, not only ignored the expert advice of this group, but duplicated and undermined its efforts; Phillips found himself and his work marginalized. His account, unfortunately, is obscured by a fog of acronyms and names. What Phillips offers is more a paradigmatic account of one official group thwarted efforts than a critical analysis of large-scale shifts in power. (June)
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